Day 1058: No Child in the Manger

The bad cat has another monthly update on the precipitous drop in Swedish births, along with a recap of the potential causative factors behind the correlation between vaccinations nine months ago and historically low birth rates today, in those countries that report both stats in an accurate and timely manner:

but instead of the sort of all hands on deck attention one would expect from a health agency in the face of such a powerful and atypical signal on such an important matter, we’re getting absolutely nothing.

studies about what happens when you read rilke to nematodes are getting more funding and interest than this.

at a certain point, this utter lack of curiosity becomes an indictment of, if not complicity, at least of culpability in cover up.

what, after all, is public health supposed to be for if not this?

if this sort of mischief with the very basis of societal perpetuation is insufficient to rouse the alleged watchmen from their slumber, how is one not to ask some VERY pointed questions not only about whether they have any use at all, but perhaps just who and what they are guarding?

perhaps it is something other than our well being…

Day 1057: The Tripledemic that Wasn't

While the world (and especially Bloomberg) continues to speculate on how many Chinese will get COVID today (e.g., 37 million), Dr. Andrew Bostom reports on some more concrete numbers from the alleged tripledemic (h/t Dr. Meryl Nass):

Serious paediatric illness is best gauged by the actual number of children hospitalised, as opposed to ‘respiratory virus test positivity’. The latter is especially misleading because of the unique, ongoing phenomenon of continued mass COVID-19 testing for minimal symptoms. Curiously, almost two months later, I could find no local media follow-up coverage elucidating the feared paediatric ‘tripledemic’ by this most germane metric: a direct comparison of children hospitalised for COVID-19, influenza or RSV.

With the cooperation of Rhode Island Department of Health (RIDOH) spokesman Joseph Wendelken, and an academic paediatrician at Hasbro Children’s Hospital, I can now present those hospitalisation data, per the table below. Given time lags in compilation and transmission, the hospitalisation record only covers all of October, and November 2022.

[table omitted]

Despite the anguished media declarations, there was no Rhode Island paediatric ‘tripledemic’, at least through October and November. RSV, alone, accounted for around 90% (194 ÷ 222 = 87.4%) of so-called ‘tripledemic’ hospitalisations among Rhode Island children, and the rate of RSV hospitalisations (97 per month), was around seven-fold the rate of COVID-19 and influenza hospitalisations combined (14 per month). Moreover, the surrogate for RSV hospitalisations, a single International Classification of Diseases (ICD) RSV code (bronchiolitis, an inflammation of the smaller lung airways) omits RSV pneumonia and bronchitis coded hospitalisations. Certainly, omitting these ICD codes underestimates true paediatric RSV admissions.

I've seen other reports of flu peaking early this year, so it's interesting to see RSV swamping even flu. Both are on the decline already, and with COVID remaining harmless to children hopefully the tripledemic that wasn't will be behind us soon.

Day 1055: The Cleveland Negative Efficacy Study

China's new 100%-COVID policy continues to mystify both onlookers and Chinese. One thing that is not all that mysterious about the news is the prediction of three waves of COVID in China this winter, because it's not actually about COVID at all, but about three waves of movement and mixing connected to the Chinese New Year celebrations.

Back in the land of The Science™, one bit of news not to be missed is the Cleveland study of booster efficacy, which, as Eugyppius notes, had the unplanned result of showing that COVID cases increase with additional mRNA boosters:

Because Pfizer only tested the effectiveness of their BA.5 bivalent vaccine on a handful of mice, there has been understandable interest in working out whether the shiny new jabs actually do anything in return for inflicting an unknown number of injuries and undesirable side-effects on the Pfizer Pfaithful. Towards this end, a few scientists at the Cleveland Clinic in Ohio have conducted a retrospective cohort study of Clinic employees who received the bivalent vaccine between September and December of this year. Most received the Pfizer cocktail, but 11% had the Moderna version.

Of 51,011 people ultimately included in the study, a mere 10,804 opted for bivalent vaccination. If anything shows that the stock of the vaccines is in freefall, it’s uptake this dismal at a major healthcare institution. The bivalently boosted were 30% less likely to be infected, in a study period where the vaccines and the circulating SARS-2 variants were for the most part perfectly aligned. In another blow to the logic of perpetual vaccination with subpar ineffective products, the authors note that their cohort had “too few severe illnesses for the study to be able to determine if the vaccine decreased severity of illness.” Because it’s severe outcomes and death, rather than infections, which matter, this is the same as saying the bivalent vaccines are totally pointless, especially in the younger cohort (mean age 42) studied here.

The real bombshell, though, is the authors’ accidental finding that risk of infection increases incrementally with each prior (non-bivalent) vaccine dose.

[...]

Their discussion of this point is more honest than you’d expect:

The association of increased risk of COVID-19 with higher numbers of prior vaccine doses in our study, was unexpected. A simplistic explanation might be that those who received more doses were more likely to be individuals at higher risk of COVID-19. A small proportion of individuals may have fit this description. However, the majority of subjects in this study were generally young individuals and all were eligible to have received at least 3 doses of vaccine by the study start date, and which they had every opportunity to do. … This is not the only study to find a possible association with more prior vaccine doses and higher risk of COVID-19. … We still have a lot to learn about protection from COVID-19 vaccination, and in addition to a vaccine’s effectiveness it is important to examine whether multiple vaccine doses given over time may not be having the beneficial effect that is generally assumed.

They also showed that prior COVID infection is effective in preventing COVID infections. (Fancy that!)

Day 1039: Not the Vaxx For Once

Eugyppius reports on raging respiratory infections in 1 out of 4 German children, especially RSV among the almost completely unvaccinated under-4 set, overwhelming hospitals. He attributes the problem to lockdowns:

This isn’t the vaccines (almost no children under 5 have been vaccinated), and it’s not just a coincidence or a bad year for RSV either. It’s a direct consequence of mass containment. While lockdowns didn’t do much about SARS-2, they appear to have reduced the incidence of other, slower-moving viruses considerably. Young women in particular have been underexposed to RSV for three years now, with the result that their breast milk confers far less passive immunity against common viruses than it did in the pre-pandemic era.

Of course a four-year-old would have been breastfed back in the Before Times, but presumably has not been exposed to enough viruses since then. For a vaxx-did-it theory, see, e.g., Igor Chudov on hematopoietic stem cells.

Day 1017: Yet Another Bad Mask Study

Of course, it's about masks. The NEJM paper is about an observational study of Boston schoolchildren, so it's been especially newsworthy here in Massachusetts. Vinay Prasad brought in Tracy Høeg to debunk the thing:

In the Boston study, the identified masking effect size against cases that is implausibly high. They say the dropping of the mask mandates corresponded with an additional 11,901 cases, which was 33.4% of ALL cases in the unmasked districts. Among the staff they found 40.4% of the cases to be attributable to the lifting of the mask mandates.

This is unrealistic considering most cases come from the community into the school AND we have a randomized study from Bangladesh failing to find any effect of either community or cloth masking in anyone under 50 (and that signal was modest, at around 11% decrease rate with surgical masks, which was uncertain, and no significant decrease with cloth masks). We also have a regression discontinuity design study from Spain which takes advantage of the fact that 5-year-olds don’t mask and 6 year old do and there was no significant discontinuity from age 5-6 as compared with other ages to suggest an effect of masking on case rates.

Additionally, the authors of the Boston study made the difficult-to-understand choice of “consider[ing] community rates of COVID-19 as part of the causal effect of school masking policies rather than a source of bias” in other words they saw community case rates to be a result of school masking policies/school case rates rather than community case rates to be the major source of school cases. A large body of research has suggested the opposite finding COVID-19 in schools is up to 10-20x more likely to come from outside of the school than from within. This includes a study from the UK where children <12 were not masked.

But they did plot the results of school COVID cases vs community covid cases and, as you can see here: [graph omitted] school case rates had a similar relationship to city/town case positivity rates in all districts, with all school case rates similar in relation to that of the community, which speaks against any large impact of school masking. Further, it is unclear why cases would be presumed to be coming from the school to the community with the school peak lagging the community peak in two of the districts or why any difference seen in the masked district would be presumed to be due to masks when the March 17 and the did not lift groups appear so similar in the difference between school (black) and community (orange) case rates. Looking overall at how much the mask district differs from the community compared with the unmasked districts, it’s clear the difference is modest---and of course may not be attributable to masks!

They both note the paper's strange focus on structural racism.

Day 1005: Amnestesia

The response to Emily Oster's recent plea in The Atlantic for a COVID-craziness amnesty went over surprisingly poorly. She got ratioed on Twitter for her forgive-and-forget stance, and all the usual suspects blogged their implacable opposition to letting anyone off the hook for criminal COVID insanity.

Mathew Crawford recaps some of the posts qua Apology Games (the lack of an apology being the first thing that comes up in criticism's of Oster's amnestesia), notably Eugyppius' salty take and Vinay Prasad's "narcissistic fence-sitting". Eugyppius was actually harsher than Crawford lets on:

Emily Oster may have said a few reasonable things in the depths of her pandemic moderation, but she can take her proposal for pandemic amnesty and shove it all the way up her ass. I’m never going to forget what these villains did to me and my friends. It is just hard to put into words how infuriating it is, to read this breezy triviliasation of the absolute hell we’ve been through, penned by some comfortable and clueless Ivy League mommyconomist who is ready to mouth support for basically any pandemic policy that doesn’t directly affect her or her family and then plead that the horrible behaviour and policies supported by her entire social milieu are just down to ignorance about the virus. We knew everything we needed to know about SARS-2 already in February 2020. The pandemicists and their supporters crossed many bright red lines in their eradicationist zeal and ruined untold millions of lives. That doesn’t all just go away now.

But of course the bad cat has the saltiest take:

it is precisely BECAUSE following vicious, evil orders is so easy in times of fear and that humans break and bow to authority with such ease that there must be sharp penalties, reputational and otherwise for so doing.

otherwise, you're just greasing the rails for next time.

it’s the low energy path of submission and freeing it from consequence serves only to render it a path more followed.

ignorance of the law is [no] excuse. neither is ignorance of ethics or epidemiology.

P.S. Not to be outdone, Eugyppius goes another round against Emily Oster and her fellow "Head Girls":

One of the reasons things like lockdowns and mass vaccination frenzies have become possible in the first place, is the uniformity of outlook and opinion among the governing elite. When everybody, from university professors to the minister president of Bavaria to municipal police administrators, believes that with enough social distancing we can eradicate SARS-2, and that the unvaccinated are responsible for prolonging the pandemic, the result is a powerful if erratic and ever-shifting social tyranny. Social media technologies have been particularly noxious for the consensus formation of the Head Girls, widening the range of issues on which they have functionally identical opinions and enforcing conformity more thoroughly than was ever before possible. And should one of their runaway preference cascades go off the rails and destroy society, they’ll rapidly reunite around the new consensus position, that nobody could’ve known any better and all the worst offenders—especially their friends and colleagues—acted in good faith with the knowledge that was available at the time.

P.P.S. Cartoonist Bob Moran also has something to say:

Day 1002: The Misinformers

On Monday, the Ethical Skeptic finally published Part 2 of his series on the CDC's death-reporting malfeasance. He elaborates on their missing and misclassified records---most notably, cancer deaths reclassified as COVID deaths to reduce the excess death rate from cancer below 9σ)---along with their callous disregard for the 20σ high in heart disease deaths since the inexplicable date of MMWR Week 14 2021.

To add insult to injury, he also find the CDC inventing fictional deaths among the unvaccinated to get the pro-vaccination results they wanted out of a sampling study, and their misuse of all-cause mortality figures. He concludes with a frightening number for excess non-COVID mortality:

In the end, it is this last chart depicted in Exhibit 6 which serves to confirm the claims made in Sections 1 through 4 of this article. The level of excess natural cause death which is not Covid itself, is around 13.3% to the excess of where it should be – even given a 1.1% baseline growth inside an aging demographic (see Exhibit 6, dark orange baseline ‘annual growth’).

Exhibit 6 – Excess Non-Covid Natural Cause Mortality as a metric, serves to filter out the distractions of Covid-19 as well as mortality from accidents, overdoses, and assault – all of which serve to cloud one’s ability to observe the entailed alarming signal. As of MMWR Week 40 2022, the US has experienced an additional 385,000 natural cause deaths above and beyond what we should have seen for this period of time. Couple this with 80,000 non-natural deaths during the same timeframe, and one finds an excess of 465,000 deaths which have occurred since MMWR Week 14 of 2021. A pandemic all unto itself.

---

Day 993: Frankencovid in the South End

The bad cat is incensed about the gain-of-COVID-function story:

“hey, what if we could make omicron even more immunity evading and as deadly as ebola?”

asked no sane person.

ever.

this is the biomedical equivalent of jumping up and down on a pogostick while holding the nuclear launch trigger. granted, this was just done in mice, but hey, that was good enough to approve a booster, right?

Eugyppius took it a little better:

To be clear: Just three years after Wuhan researchers decided it would be cool to insert a codon-optimised furin cleavage site at the S1/S2 junction of this interesting SARS-related bat virus they found, Boston researchers thought maybe it’d be fun to start mixing and matching different SARS-2 proteins to see if a new chimeric virus might be more exciting than boring old Omicron. The payoff is not any vaccine or treatment, but the mere knowledge that it is not just the spike protein that contributes to the pathogenicity of SARS-2. For extra fun, they did not conduct this research in space or at the bottom of the Marianas Trench, but in a BSL-3 facility at the National Emerging Infectious Diseases Laboratories on Albany Street in the Boston South End.

He notes that while Alex Berenson thinks this is all a nothingburger, its flailing short-order cooks still pose a serious threat to humanity:

But, I’m just not much comforted by this. Beyond broader concerns with the entire enterprise of enhancing viruses in the lab for shits and giggles: The experimenters improved a slower-moving and more lethal wild-type strain by giving it the more infectious Omicron BA.1 spike. I think there are evolutionary reasons why such a combination is unlikely to arise naturally, and why this kind of research amounts to helping viruses achieve otherwise out-of-reach protein combinations for which our natural defences are ill-equipped.

He's also disturbed that the short-order cooks at BU seem to feel the need to lie about it to boot.

Day 985: The Cold Pandemic

Despise surprisingly low rates of toddler vaccination and adult boosting against COVID (under 5% each), the pandemic of the moment appears to be the common cold:

Sick kids are crowding emergency rooms in various parts of the country, and some pediatric hospitals say they are running out of beds. But this uptick in illness has largely been due to viruses other than the coronavirus, like RSV, enteroviruses and rhinovirus.

While respiratory infections typically surge in the winter months, experts say that this year the season has started much sooner, and that numbers are unusually high.

"Rates are as high as 25% of those [who have] tested positive for RSV. That is quite unusual for October, we would typically start to see higher rates in November, December and January," said Dr. Ibukun Kalu, a specialist in pediatric infectious diseases at Duke Children's Hospital in Durham, North Carolina.

[...]

For now, the issue is concentrated among younger patients. But Kalu said that with the colder months coming up, it could begin to impact more people.

"As we see more viral infections in kids, we will see a similar pattern in adults," she said.

Day 973: Deja Poo

Credit for today's title goes to the Boston Herald, reporting on the MWRA COVID spike:

The seven-day COVID wastewater average for the north-of-Boston region has jumped more than 100% within the last week, according to Wednesday’s update from the Massachusetts Water Resources Authority tracker.

The daily average for the north-of-the-city area is now 1,016 copies per milliliter, a 104% spike from the average of 497 copies last Wednesday.

The seven-day COVID wastewater average for the south-of-Boston region has increased 56% within the last week. The average is now 993 copies, which is up from 637 copies last Wednesday.

Why a sudden spike when the weather hasn't changed much this month? Well, it is booster season, and the Daily Skeptic has picked up Alex Berenson's reporting on a paper in the Lancet showing immune suppression immediately after the shots, as well as the general negative efficacy of COVID vaccination:

The top two [figures from the paper's supplementary data] show that in the two weeks following the first jab individuals were three to four times more likely to test positive for Covid than their unvaccinated counterparts. This is further confirmation of the post-jab spike in infections that has often been noted and which there is evidence is a result of the vaccination temporarily reducing immunity.

The third figure shows that two weeks or more after the second jab – which during 2021 was regarded as ‘fully vaccinated’ – individuals were 44% more likely to be infected than their unvaccinated counterparts. This is negative vaccine effectiveness (where infections are higher in the vaccinated than the unvaccinated) of minus-44%. This negative effectiveness is in line with what was seen in the raw data from England at the time and also in studies from other countries, but contradicts the Government’s official estimates, which claimed effectiveness to be 60-85% against Delta infection. The new study indicates that the negative effectiveness was not just a result of confounding factors or a ‘catch-up’ effect, where the vaccinated have lower infection rates initially then higher infection rates as the effect of the vaccine wears off, as some have claimed.

Acknowledging the figures, the authors write: “Surprisingly, we observed a higher risk of test positivity after vaccination with one or two doses across all BMI groups, which is contrary to evidence reported by the U.K. ONS.” What they don’t mention is that it is fully in line with data from the UKHSA, nor that the ONS is known to overestimate infection rates in the unvaccinated because it underestimates the population – the ONS puts the unvaccinated adult population at 8% whereas the NIMS database puts it at 19% (and surveys higher still at 26%).

Or we could just blame it all on innocent schoolchildren, again.

Day 963: ADE in Vitro

The usual suspects have all picked up on the new report in Nature on antibody-depenent enhancement (ADE) from both COVID vaccines and monoclonal antibody treatments. To the pro-vaxxer cries of "this is merely in vitro," Eugyppius adds a handy reminder that we may already have plenty of in vivo data:

Remember how everywhere mass vaccination occurs, we tend to see higher frequencies of infection? Remember how, in the deeply unadjusted and unreliable UKHSA vaccine efficacy statistics from the start of the year, the double-vaccinated appeared to experience higher rates of infection and death than the unvaccinated? Crazy conspiracy theorists might be forgiven for wondering if these are the effects of antibody-enhanced virus replication in the lungs of people more than six months out from their second jab.

Day 959: Excess Mortality: Italian Edition

While vaxx-driven excess mortality news has come out of Switzerland and Australia lately, today Eugyppius addresses a differently horrifying excess mortality story out of Northern Italy early in the pandemic:

Engler draws attention to the curious fact that early Italian excess mortality did not seem to spread from one Italian province to another – following virus infections outwards from an epicentre – but rather struck the affected regions all at once: [graph omitted]

What’s more, the excess deaths are clustered within the boundaries of the affected provinces, “meaning that which one of the 13 provinces a person lived in was a much better predictor of death than whether there was a high rate of deaths in neighbouring municipalities.” For Engler, this implicates provincial-level administrative decisions as to the rationing of care and provisions for the vulnerable, especially in the face of staffing shortages.

Day 947: See No Evil, Israeli Edition

Steve Kirsch reports on a budding Israeli scandal in which the Ministry of Health (MoH), not unlike our CDC, ignored its obligation to track vaccine side effects for an entire year. Next, they commissioned a study of the next six months of side effects, but then fudged the numbers for the public to greatly reduce the side effect profile:

The panel presented their findings to MoH personnel on or about Jun 6, 2022 in a Zoom call that was secretly recorded. They found that the COVID vaccines were much more dangerous to people than the world authorities admitted. They found serious adverse events that were never disclosed by Pfizer or any world government. These adverse events were also not found to be short term as the public was told.

They also determined causality, something no other world health authority has ever been willing to do (because other governments never looked at the data either). Causality was both obvious and easy to prove using the re-challenge data that was collected (you can’t do this using the US VAERS data, for example).

Day 946: Excess Mortality, German Edition

Via Eugyppius: a preprint linking German excess mortality to the temporal pattern of mass administration of spike-bases vaxes in the country:

In 2020, the observed number of deaths was close to the expected number with respect to the empirical standard deviation. By contrast, in 2021, the observed number of deaths was two empirical standard deviations above the expected number. The high excess mortality in 2021 was almost entirely due to an increase in deaths in the age groups between 15 and 79 and started to accumulate only from April 2021 onwards. A similar mortality pattern was observed for stillbirths with an increase of about 11 percent in the second quarter of the year 2021.

Something must have happened in April 2021 that led to a sudden and sustained increase in mortality in the age groups below 80 years, although no such effects on mortality had been observed during the COVID-19 pandemic so far.

Stillbirths are defined thus:

One problem with analyzing excess mortality at the level of stillbirths in Germany is that the definition of a ‘stillbirth’ has been changed at the end of 2018. Until then, a stillborn child was considered a stillbirth if a birth weight of at least 500 grams was reached. Since the end of 2018, a stillborn child is considered a stillbirth if at least 500 grams or the 24th week of pregnancy was reached, which led to a diagnostically related increase in stillbirths. This means that the figures on stillbirths are only validly comparable from 2019 onwards.

Day 934: Excess Mortality, CDC Edition

After months of agitating on Twitter, the Ethical Skeptic has finally posted to his blog about American excess mortality and the CDC's delinquent death data:

Finally, we end with the most important chart of all – the chart which indicates deaths which are not from accidents, suicide, addiction, assault, abuse, despair, disruption, nor Covid-19. The Excess Non-Covid Natural Cause Mortality chart which we began monitoring on May 29th 2021. What I called then, the ‘What the hell is this?’ chart. As one can see, we have lost 344,000 younger Americans to something besides Covid and non-natural death, during the period from 3 April 2021 to 6 August 2022. The current rate of mortality in this ICD categorization, is around 5,000 or more per week (the database shows a most recent five-week, weekly average of 7,887 deaths – subject to lag of course) – which exceeds most weeks of the Covid pandemic itself (save for the absolute peak periods).

By now, if all these mortality excesses were indeed a holdover from Covid-19 itself, they should have already begun to tail off. Unfortunately they are not only not tailing off, in many cases they are still increasing.

Accordingly, and without a shadow of a doubt, we have established that right now there exists a problem in terms of US citizen health and mortality. One which is differentiated from Covid-19 itself, and began in earnest MMWR Week 14 of 2021. Our next task, and what will be outlaid in Parts 2 and 3 of this article series, is to employ these and other observed arrival distributions to winnow out the causal mechanism(s) behind this concerning trend in US mortality.

Having made significant progress on the second and third article already, we very much look forward to publishing for the reader, our next article in the series, ‘Houston, We Know the Mechanisms (Part 2 of 3)’.

Day 919: Bad Lots Again

Followers of all things apparently or truly wrong with the COVID vaccines may recall some concern over bad lots. Back in the day the hot lots theory was a bit of a Swiss cheese, but due to Aaron Siri's tireless FOIA requests, the bad batch bunch now have an official lot list to compare to the mass of lot typos that is VAERS.

The result is some serious allegations against Pfizer, for a bad manufacturing process or just a bad product resulting in lots of deaths in early 2021, then secretly doing something to address the carnage.

Strangely, there's no particular comment about Moderna, despite similar indications of bad lots. The bad batchers don't seem to have updated their How Bad is My Batch? website with the cleaned up batch numbers yet, either. Perhaps they're still working on it.

Day 911: Even the President Rebounds

CNN reports that the President's COVID is back, due to the usual a rare Paxlovid rebound.

P.S. The Babylon Bee responds.

Day 910: Vaxxcess Mortality

The usual suspects have been reporting on excess mortality associated with the COVID vaccines. In the latest volley, Alex Berenson reports on a pre-print showing a correlation between vaccination rates and excess mortality rates in the Netherlands.

The finding in the new paper is particularly striking because the Netherlands has very high Covid vaccination levels nationally, so the differences between cities are relatively small. Almost every city had vaccination rates between 70 and 90 percent - mostly mRNA shots from Pfizer and Moderna, along with some DNA/AAV vaccines.

The paper found a “vaccination-correlated mortality rate” of about 5 percent of total mortality, meaning that 5 percent of deaths were skewed in patterns that reflected vaccination rates.

As the paper explains, the pattern does not prove that vaccinations actually caused those deaths, merely that the correlation exists. Still, since last summer, highly vaccinated countries have generally posted non-Covid death increases of 5 to 10 percent, the 5 percent figure is far from implausible.

A 5 percent increase in deaths may seem small, but by historical standards it is a huge annual change. It would translate into almost 175,000 extra deaths annually in the United States and more in Europe.

The paper has not been peer-reviewed, and its author, Andre Redert, is a computer scientist, not an epidemiologist (which is arguably a point in his favor).

He also tweets about mortality running 12% above normal in England.

Although the mainstream news has ignored the excess mortality story, the anti-anti-vaxxers have tried to make a case against it using US data. The ever-watchful bad cat dedebunked them, citing various methods not unlike those of the Dutch paper, most notably the Ethical Skeptic's, who also observes that the CDC is suspiciously far behind on publishing US mortality data.

Dr. Meryl Nass continues the life insurance saga with record claims/payouts for 2021.

Day 908: Prions Again

A French preprint came out in June documenting 26 out of over 50 sudden cases of Creutzfeld Jakob disease (CJD) after vaccination with COVID vaccines. The preprint has since been taken down, but you can get it from the Wayback Machine if you're interested.

The paper goes through the usual PLAAC analysis to detect a prion region in the older COVID spike protein used in the vaccines, and reassuringly documents that this region has disappeared from Omicron. It's perhaps more interesting for the 26 French case studies (out of over 50), along with another 16 cases from abroad. In a later edit they mention 19 CJD deaths recorded in VAERS through April, and link to a search that actually produces 33 CJD deaths out of VAERS when run on today's data. (If you're wondering whether health care workers have the time these days for differential diagnosis of CJD, there are more accurate, real-time tests now than the traditional "check the brain for holes on autopsy".)

Before you start worrying that you may already be a downer, the authors have more good news; the average time of onset in France was 11 days after vaccination, so you're probably in the clear as long as you avoid boosters. (Sadly there was no genetic analysis for the downer codon.)

CJD is a death sentence, and it took about five months for patients to die, though some died "sudden[ly]" after only 2.5 months. An addendum notes that they are all dead now; one unfortunate soul apparently lasted a year. The sudden onset and rapid death are enough to distinguish the cases from sporadic CJD (sCJD) or variant (mad cow) CJD (vCJD).

PlagueBlog pauses to suggest the abbreviation vxCJD.

Three of the French cases were associated with the AstraZeneca (non-mRNA) vaccine, though all the VAERS cases list mRNA vaccines. (This is not a result of high uptake of AstraZeneca, which is only about 5% of the doses given in France to date.) While COVID itself may have caused some rise in CJD cases pre-Omicron, PlagueBlog has found that case reports claiming so usually fail to note whether the patient had a spike-based vaccine about 11 days before onset of CJD symptoms, regardless of their COVID histories.

Note that this rash of vxCJD would not be the first vaccine disaster involving transmissible spongiform encephalopathies. A sheep vaccine caused a scrapie outbreak known as the 1935 Moredun Louping-ill Vaccine Disaster. Another contaminated vaccine caused a smaller scrapie outbreak in Italy in the 1990's.

Day 902: Even the President

President Biden, despite being double-vaxxed and double-boosted, has tested positive for COVID. According to news reports, he plans to take Paxlovid, the not particularly effective Pfizer antiviral best known for its rebound cases.

P.S. The Babylon Bee has the most unique coverage of this breaking story.